Holy Graupel, Zachman!

This morning, weather stations reported robust SWE and/or snowfall totals from the northern Whitefish Range, interior GNP, and JFS Canyon. The Tunnel Ridge station is temporarily down, so I went to the northern Flathead Range to "fill in the gaps".

• The snow line was ~4000' with just 2-3" of new at mid-elevations. The new snow sits on top of 2-3" of snow leftover from the weekend storm.
• Moderate winds mixed down to the valley floor at low and mid-elevations resulting in light to moderate wind transport. Poor visibility limited observations of wind transport at upper elevations but it sounded windy.
• Despite occasionally blustery conditions, no wind slabs were found up to 5400'.
• Skiing on southerly aspects was great fun with 4-6" of snow on top of a supportable crust.
• The most interesting find was large deep deposition zones of graupel at the top of runout zones on south-facing avalanche paths. It appears that "sluffs" of graupel ran down these paths depositing up to 18" of graupel over vast areas.